Director, Platform & Engineering — Scale & Reliability

Advance Venture Partners, LLC.; United States; Remote; USD 217,000 - 319,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision insurance (100

401(k) plan with company matching

Parental leave

Mental Wellness Program & EAP

Generous PTO and holidays

Learning & Development programs

Equipment and remote-work reimburse

Job summary

Life360 is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead and operate our core platforms, including location, messaging, cloud infrastructure, and partner ecosystems. You will set technical direction, develop strong engineering leaders, and ensure reliability, security, and scalable systems for hundreds of millions of members worldwide.

This leadership role blends deep technical judgment with business impact. You will mentor managers, drive architectural decisions, and collaborate with Product,

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years leading engineering teams.
• Track record of leading backend or platform engineering at high scale.
• Demonstrated success coaching managers, including former ICs who grew into leadership.
• Experience translating company strategy into technical plans.
• Experience modernizing legacy systems with respect for their history.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills to resolve ownership conflicts.
• Hands-on credibility in cloud infrastructure and distributed systems (AWS preferred).
• Excellent written and verbal communication.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Build the foundation for scale by leading teams behind location, messaging, cloud, and identity platforms.
• Anticipate bottlenecks and reliability risks, modernize systems, and balance near-term needs with long-term investments.
• Ensure high availability, performance, observability, security, and incident response.
• Create an engineering culture with ownership and accountability, empowering leaders to deliver outcomes.
• Establish meaningful engineering metrics across reliability, cost, and productivity.
• Grow leaders by hiring, coaching, and developing managers and senior engineers.
• Build reusable services and platforms to accelerate product teams and expand partnerships.
• Translate technical investments into business outcomes and communicate impact to leadership.

Skills

Software engineering

Lead engineering teams

Backend platforms

Coaching managers

Translate strategy into plans

Modernize legacy systems

Cross-functional partnership

Cloud infrastructure

AWS experience

Communication skills

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience

Tools

AWS

Job description

Life360 is seeking a Director of Engineering to lead and operate our core platforms, including location, messaging, cloud infrastructure, and partner ecosystems. You will set technical direction, develop strong engineering leaders, and ensure reliability, security, and scalable systems for hundreds of millions of members worldwide.

This leadership role blends deep technical judgment with business impact. You will mentor managers, drive architectural decisions, and collaborate with Product,